Last Night's Tv

Until Gordon Brown's eagerly awaited cooking show arrives, I am happy to settle for The Restaurant (BBC2) with Raymond Blanc, the only chef with pretty manners. If Blanc has a dog (and he did refer to one dish as a dog's dinner), he won't say: "Sit!" He will say: "Please make yourself comfortable." With the stress on the wrong syllable. Blanc has not squandered his life polishing his English accent.

The idea of The Restaurant is that each couple is given premises which they run according to their philosophy (one proposed a Chinese-Welsh theme) and the winner gets to keep the joint. Last night, in a tense game of musical cooking, there were only eight restaurants for nine couples, so one couple arrived and left almost immediately, as if in a revolving door.

The contestants are largely picked for entertainment potential. I have high hopes of James and Alasdair. James (shown kickboxing) said, "Anything that does get in our way, we're going to smash it down." The first obstacle he encountered was Blanc, who dismantled him delicately. Apparently his saffron pommes purées had split. "Would you serve a split potato in your restaurant where people are having to pay £80? So why do you do it to ME?" James was now gnawing his knuckles like a fox in a trap. And, Blanc added, he'd tasted the water the potatoes were cooked in and had identified detergent. The last we saw of James he was in floods, being comforted by Alasdair.

Scott and Richard "serve food to the international jet set". (Who writes this stuff?) Coarsely, they are cabin crew. Richard said, "Over the past years I've served Princess Diana, Prince William, Naomi Campbell ... " Really? Hard luck! Scott made seasonal pea-and-mint soup served in a hollowed-out loaf. Raymond was not impressed. "In France we put bread in our soup but you put soup in your bread. Very good, but why all that mess, why all that cost, why all that work?" And (that ominous "and" again) it was not seasonal pea soup because peas were not in season. Personally, I'd have liked to have heard Naomi Campbell's opinion.

Helen and her husband Steve, after a harrowing experience of dining out with six children, cooked fun fruity frisbees for kids. Does anyone with young children spot the design flaw?

Russell and his girlfriend, Michelle, were so in love it was like talking to turtle doves. Michelle burbled, "We want our restaurant to be like walking into a big cuddle. We will call it The Cheerful Soul." (Or sole, who knows?) They tend to add wild flowers to everything because Michelle likes them.

The couple who left were Annette and her daughter, Kashell. It was, perhaps, a mistake to whisk a tin of mango pulp with cream and call it a sweet. "If it sets, it's a sorbet. If it doesn't, it's a mousse," said Annette, in terms any home cook with recognise. It was a mousse.

A rather more successful Caribbean cook, Ainsley Harriott, truffled up his roots in Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1).

Once, in a sale room, I opened a wardrobe and, dangling there on a rope, was a skeleton. I could neither move nor breathe. Television and skeletons are natural, if bony, bedfellows but this was the thing itself. A couple of family skeletons took a bit of bounce out of Ainsley.

He discovered that his great-great- great-grandfather Harriott was a white slave-owner ("Fucking hell! Sorry! Can I sit down?") who owned 15 slaves when he was only four. All were meticulously and mellifluously listed as Sancho, Caesar, London, Oxford, Duke, August, Charity, Mary, Camelia, Phoebe, Jenny, Delia, Sylvia, Grace and Rachael.

And his great-great-great-great grandmother, Rachael, was a prostitute. Bridgetown, Barbados, was notorious for taverns and brothels, and Rachael owned nine brothels in the red-light district where, as Pedro Welch, a local historian with a nice turn of phrase, put it, "the fleshly opportunities lay". Good Old Pedro ("I want to say it as delicately as I can") put the best gloss on it he could. "She is saying to the system: 'You wanted to destroy my spirit. You wanted to make me property myself. You want to make me a non-person. But I am somebody!'" Call me, in fact, madam.

Lost in Austen (ITV1) continues, fruity and frothy like a jam omelette. This is the fantasy of a very modern girl, Amanda, lost in Pride and Prejudice. Her salary, £27,000 a year, caused some flutters, kicking Mr Darcy's pittance into touch. Mr Collins arrived, looking disturbingly like Disraeli, and Amanda noticed: "He squeezes himself through his trouser pocket. And Then He Sniffs His Fingers!" That's where a top hat comes in handy. Horrifyingly, in spite or because of Amanda's meddling, Mr Collins married Jane last night. Amazingly good for ITV. Surely some mistake here?